Christmas upgrades

V|per

V|per

V|per

Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2005
Posts
2,643
Location
Worcestershire
OK, so i've been out of the PC building game for a while, so i'm thinking of throwing £200-£300 at my PC.

Current Spec:

e8600
4gb Kingston ddr2 ram
Asus maximus II Formula
8800gts 512

plus the usual other stuff - hdd's/optical drives/fans etc etc

I've got a 1kw Silverstone psu, so that'll more than likely be sufficient, unless form factors have changed a lot in the last couple of years.

My question is this: would it be better throwing the money at a gfx card upgrade, or go for the mobo/cpu/ram combp first? PC is used mainly for gaming, although i've not really had anything new to play for a while. Just got the witcher 2 on the steam sale, and it runs terribly poorly on lowest settings @ 1680x1050 (native resolution is 1920x1080)

Gfx will have to be nvidia, too much of a fanboy.

If you guys could give me some suggestions, preferably 2 price ranges, £200 and £300 and chuck us your advice on what'd be the best initial upgrade path.

Cheers!
 
 
^^ I was just about to post something similar .

That motherboard requires a BIOS update to run 22nm Ivybridge CPUs, post in customer service to ask about which version of the BIOS is loaded on the board and confirm that it is compatible with Ivybridge CPUs.
 
Fire_fly said:
^^ I was just about to post something similar .

That motherboard requires a BIOS update to run 22nm Ivybridge CPUs, post in customer service to ask about which version of the BIOS is loaded on the board and confirm that it is compatible with Ivybridge CPUs.
Click to expand...

I think most of these boards now come with the appropriate bios. But it would`nt hurt to check.:)
 
Well, i never really even considered going for the lot in one go... Cheers for the suggestions, but:

The idea was to spend 2-300 now, and 2-300 after christmas, one on gfx card, one on cpu/mobo/ram bundle. which would be more beneficial to get first?
 
You'd notice more of an immediate performance increase getting the GPU first I would think but it would possibly be bottle-necked by your current CPU.
 
B1gbeard said:
You'd notice more of an immediate performance increase getting the GPU first I would think but it would possibly be bottle-necked by your current CPU.
Click to expand...

Try playing a game that your pc finds hard to handle, while monitoring the FPS, then lower the resolution.

If you don't get any FPS increase with the lower resolution your CPU is bottlenecking the GFX card, if that was the case I'd get the new CPU first.
 
V|per said:
Well, i never really even considered going for the lot in one go... Cheers for the suggestions, but:

The idea was to spend 2-300 now, and 2-300 after christmas, one on gfx card, one on cpu/mobo/ram bundle. which would be more beneficial to get first?
Click to expand...

Without a doubt upgrade your GPU. Your new GFX will be bottlenecked until you get a new CPU but not as much as a new CPU would be bottlenecked by your 8800gt. :)
 
He needs full upgrade of the system, throwing in 7970 with that CPU and that amount of ram, will be useless...

I couldnt do anything with 4gb of ram, games used to crash non-stop.

I would wait till I have 500 quid, you need 3570k with a decent 200 pounds gpu.

Its like going to a scrap yard and spraying channel No.5 there.. not going to do a lot is it to improve the smell.
 
Last edited:
Lazder said:
He needs full upgrade of the system, throwing in 7970 with that CPU and that amount of ram, will be useless...

I couldnt do anything with 4gb of ram, games used to crash non-stop.

I would wait till I have 500 quid, you need 3570k with a decent 200 pounds gpu.

Its like going to a scrap yard and spraying channel No.5 there.. not going to do a lot is it to improve the smell.
Click to expand...

I was running 4gb of RAM on 32bit win 7 until recently. I can't remember the last time my PC crashed a game.

But I mostly agree with what you're saying, it would better to upgrade all at once. :) But I'm not sure scrapyards actually smell as bad as you're making out. :D
 
plenty of gfx cards on offer at the moment, can you guys actually see them coming down further in price just after christmas? (hopefully they will) :)

Having recently bought a new gfx card and finding it bottlenecked by my cpu id advise not to get the gfx card first as it is frustrating sat looking at bf3 spiking on ultra knowing the gfx card can handle it but your cpu wont. Seemed like a waste of money, so id wait until you can buy everything, unless there are some unmissable deals on for either :)
 
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